Saturday, September 03, 2016

Julian Assange and the exposing of the Joe McCarthy’s standards of The New York Times

Julian Assange and the New McCarthyism

America’s newspaper of record ran a front-page article this past Thursday, “How Russia Often Benefits as Assange Reveals Secrets” that exemplifies the “New McCarthyism” at work.

The article insinuated without providing any concrete proof that Russian intelligence was behind the leaked emails pertaining to the Democratic National Committee’s efforts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders and ensure the nomination of Hillary Clinton.

The allegations are based on the claim by an unnamed CIA official that Wikileaks materials had the same bit of code and telltale metadata traced to previous intrusions attributed to Russian spy agencies.

The New York Times’ article quotes critics of Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who said he had become blinkered in his worldview while confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and a one dimensional critic of U.S. policy. The authors noted that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had taken up Assange’s cause and they criticized Assange for taking a critical view of Western political interference in the Ukraine.

During the era of Joseph McCarthy critics of U.S. government policy were similarly maligned for being anti-American or pro-Russian or communist if they raised serious ethical questions about U.S. policy. Many were also accused of being spies unfairly, including Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed by the state unjustly as recent evidence has confirmed.

FDR’s Vice-President Henry Wallace, one of the victims of McCarthyism, was smeared as a pro-communist and an apologist for Soviet premier Joseph Stalin simply because he believed that the Russians did not have the capacity to attack the U.S. and could be engaged with through diplomacy like any other country.

A trademark of McCarthy was to accuse someone of being a communist agent based on rumor, conjecture or fabricated evidence. The New York Times appears to have lowered itself to Mr. McCarthy’s standards as the article on Assange does not contain one bit of hard evidence the email leaks came from Russian government sources. There is only speculation and “belief” by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have a history of planting misinformation in the media in order to shape public opinion.

A cardinal rule of journalism is to present evidence to back up one’s story. Rumor or hearsay is no basis for charging somebody with something.

In this case, the Times employs a coy rhetorical trick. Since they have no actual evidence against Assange, they frame it that Russia “benefits” from his revelations and that the “agenda of Wikileaks and the Kremlin often overlap.” The effect is to equate Assange with Russia and vilify him, while blocking discussion about the Wikileaks revelations themselves and their implications.

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in their 1989 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, emphasize the Times‘ historical role in promoting U.S. government interests in foreign affairs and marginalizing critics of the capitalist system. The Assange case fits directly into their analysis.

The “newspaper of record” and its pundits have supported Hillary Clinton from the beginning of the election campaign, and want to whitewash any evidence that the primary process was flawed. Fitting the interests of the military-industrial complex which needs an excuse to keep arms sales going, the Times has adopted a vendetta against Putin and supported the reckless Obama administration policies that have resulted in a new cold war.

The Nation Magazine, which has a proud tradition of standing up to McCarthyism, penned a strong editorial last month “Against Neo-McCarthyism.” It emphasized how critics of U.S. foreign policy and NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, including at varying points in his campaign, Donald Trump, have been accused of being Putin surrogates. Liberal Times writer Paul Krugman as a case in point asked in one of his columns if “Donald Trump would be Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House if elected?,” insinuating he was some kind of Manchurian candidate.

James Kirchick in The Daily Beast meanwhile accused progressive critics of Clinton’s foreign policy of being closet Trump supporters” and by implication “Putin’s pawns.”

This is another example of a disturbing trend whose net effect is to limit rational dialogue and debate on major social problems and to threaten revival of a political culture reminiscent of America’s dark-age.

The allegations are based on the claim by an unnamed CIA official that Wikileaks materials had the same bit of code and telltale metadata traced to previous intrusions attributed to Russian spy agencies.

while it's possible, from what I've read it appears to me that Russia is being made the patsy. While it could be them given the details of the hack and the signatures, if it was them it seemed way too obvious. There appeared to be no attempts to hide their identities.

If I were to bet, I put my money on either independent hackers or one or more of the big cyber-security firms who are getting rich off the current cyber-wars going on between various countries. Just as the MIC gets rich promoting conflict in the WOT. These companies get rich promoting conflict in the cyber-wars.

Who's going to send remittances? There's going to be a deportation force ejecting every Mexican from the first hour after noon on Jan 20, 2017. If you tax Mexican-American citizens sending remittances then Mexico isn't paying for the wall, we are.

Deuce: "Trump made a respectful and respectable showing at a black church in Detroit. The pool feed provided by the MSM cut the feed the moment it appeared Bishop Wayne was about to bless-or anoint Donald Trump."

Laura Ingraham: "How convenient that at one of the most compelling moments of @realDonaldTrump appearance in Detroit, the @CNN satellite feed dropped."

Sopan Deb: "Totally inaccurate. I was the pool producer. We were forced to pack up our cameras and leave during this. If you want to make this an issue, please take it up with the campaign. We tried to stay and shoot this whole thing"

Jill Colvin: "Pool was ushered out by campaign staff while Trump was still on stage."

Two retired four-star U.S. Army generals stepped up on Thursday morning and endorsed the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Gens. David Maddox and Bob Sennewald issued a joint statement to the press, saying:

'Having each served over 34 years and retired as an Army four-star general, we each have worked closely with America’s strongest allies, both in NATO and throughout Asia. Our votes have always been private, and neither of us has ever previously lent his name or voice to a presidential candidate. Having studied what is at stake for this country and the alternatives we have now, we see only one viable leader, and will be voting this November for Secretary Hillary Clinton.’

Trump only likes veterans who don't get captured. Trump only likes families of veterans who don't get killed.

"In the 2012 election, Republicans believed that the polls were skewed in Obama’s favor, and did not take conservative enthusiasm into consideration. I was one of them - I believed we were going to win. I believed the polls were wrong...On election night when President Obama easily won reelection, I vowed to never put myself in that position again. I wouldn’t simply listen to what I wanted to hear. I would instead take the numbers for what they were, because the polling involved specifically in presidential elections has been accurate since 1952."

And the ground game starts to pay off after Labor Day. Trump has next to nothing, and a reputation for stiffing anyone that might offer to help. Low Info Bobbo will post polls that are fluctuations in the noise but Trump really has no path to 270. The debates will seal the deal.

I am undecided about who I will support. I am at Defcon 1 in my opposition to Clinton. Obviously, I will not vote for her. I am only one vote in a very pivotal state. Unfortunately, it is winner take all in the electoral college and Pennsylvania has 20 votes.

There is no role for coalition parties as there is in real democracies with parliamentary representation. The US election scam is set up so that the house always wins. The media and oligarchs own the house. They control the federal police forces and the Pentagon’s mercenary forces of the empire. Their single victory is that they destroyed the citizen armies. They own the legal system and the courts. They write the laws, make the rules and fly the flag.

The only real power of the American people is to occasionally scare the living shit out of the establishment. The last time that happened is when Nixon commandeered the buses to surround the White House. This may be one of those times.

The other day someone put up some silly post about Sanders using excess campaign finances to buy a vacation home. Since the headline was absurd I didn't bother reading it. However, it raises the question, of the various candidates if they were questioned on this subject which do you think would plead 'no one ever instructed me on the strict federal guidelines on this matter' or 'due to recent neurological problems I must have forgot'.

...For a donation of $2,700, the children (under 16) of donors at an event last month at the Sag Harbor, N.Y., estate of the hedge fund magnate Adam Sender could ask Mrs. Clinton a question. A family photo with Mrs. Clinton cost $10,000, according to attendees.

And when Mrs. Clinton attended a dinner at the Beverly Hills home of the entertainment executive Haim Saban last month, the invitation was very clear. If attendees wanted to dine and receive a photo with Mrs. Clinton they had to pay their own way: “Write not raise” $100,000.

Another advantage to choosing private fund-raisers over town halls or other public events is that Mrs. Clinton can bask in an affectionate embrace as hosts try to limit confrontational engagements.

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a backer of Democrats and a friend of the Clintons’, made sure attendees did not grill Mrs. Clinton at the $100,000-per-couple lamb dinner Mrs. Forester de Rothschild hosted under a tent on the lawn of her oceanfront Martha’s Vineyard mansion.

“I said, ‘Let’s make it a nice night for her and show her our love,’” Mrs. Forester de Rothschild said...

Very civilized and with none of those pesky reporters asking boorish questions.

Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace were selected Friday to moderate this year’s presidential debates, providing a diverse and noncontroversial group of anchors for a role that has often been a lightning rod for partisan criticism.

Mr. Holt, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” will moderate the first debate on Sept. 26; Ms. Raddatz of ABC and Mr. Cooper of CNN will moderate the town hall debate on Oct. 9; and Mr. Wallace of Fox News will handle the final debate on Oct. 19. All are first-time presidential debate moderators.

Looks like they came up with about as fair a group is possible. No one gets what they want and both with be faced with some tough questions. I like Holt but don't know much about Martha Raddatz. My impression of her has always been that she is kind of non-aggressive perhaps even meek. With Cooper and Wallace, both candidates should face some tough questions.

If Trump backs out of the debates, it will be another black mark on him. IMO.

Of course, we are fed the horseshit from elementary school on up that the wisdom of the founders was to keep the masses in their place with the electoral college and that the winner takes all. That rot allowed the creation of a Lincoln and the utter disaster of getting 700,000 Americans killed, the ethnic cleansing of the American West, the establishment of a policy of empire, an economic collapse that lasted the best part of fifty years and set in motion a 150 year war between the races.

It is exactly what happened all over the earth, just coming late to the 'new world'......the pushing aside of the Paleolithic hunter/fisher/gatherer culture by the agriculturalists, and the resulting city builders, due to the increase in population through farming.

By the way, out this way there are more Nez Perce/Nimiipuu than there used to be, and most drive big pickup trucks and none live in teepees, though they could if they wished.

They no longer wish to do so. They like electricity, Iphones, and computers.....and big pickups trucks....

GOP consultant Ana Navarro emails that Trump could indeed be hurting the GOP long term:

“Trump’s fate has been decided with Latinos. Put a fork in him, he’s done. What we have to worry about now is that Trump does not do to the GOP nationally what Pete Wilson did to the GOP in California. He made the party brand less popular than Dengue Fever among Hispanics.”

As always, I’ll remind you that I’ve been treating Morning Consult as more of a trends tracker than an iron-clad snapshot because of its large, consistent sample size, but the trends have been steady for a while now. Hillary Clinton’s post-convention bounce was temporary and the tide has been slowly shifting in Trump’s favor for a full month. If anyone tells you that this race is over and Hillary Clinton is winning in a landslide, exercise caution if they try to sell you a bridge.

As Ian reports, it has now come to light that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy about 30 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi massacre.

They were recovered by the FBI, notwithstanding the use by Mrs. “Like With a Cloth or Something” of an advanced software program – “BleachBit” – in a willful effort to erase the contents of her servers so thoroughly that no one would be able to recover her emails (many of which were government records, which it is a felony to hoard and destroy).

All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs (象形 pinyin: xiàngxíng) and a number which are ideographic (指事 zhǐshì) in origin, including compound ideographs (會意 huìyì), but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds (形聲 xíngshēng). The other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters (假借 jiǎjiè) and "derivative cognates" (轉注 zhuǎn zhù). Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories.

In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be referred to as ideograms, due to the misconception that characters represented ideas directly, whereas in fact they do so only through association with the spoken word.[1].....

As the crucial post–Labor Day period of the presidential election approaches, Hillary Clinton appears to be losing her once-huge lead over Donald Trump in national polls.

The latest example of this can be seen in the Morning Consult poll released Sunday morning that shows Clinton leading Trump by a measly 2 points—42 percent to 40 percent—in a two-way race. That marks a 5-point narrowing from three weeks ago, when Clinton led by 7 points. And there are a lot of people still trying to make up their minds.

That narrowing of the race has been seen in other national polls as well. For example, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Friday showed Trump slightly ahead with support from 40 percent of likely voters, compared to 39 percent for Clinton, an effective tie that marks a huge plunge from the 8-point lead the Democratic candidate once enjoyed. This came on the heels of a Fox News poll that showed Clinton narrowing her lead to a measly 2 points. CNN’s poll of polls shows Clinton lead “has been cut in half,” with an average of 42 percent support, compared to Trump’s 37 percent. The analysis of polls by Real Clear Politics shows a similar trend, with Clinton cutting her lead to 4 points.

As fascinating as the national horse race is though, everyone knows it’s pretty meaningless when it comes to predicting a presidential election that is not decided by popular vote. In key battleground states, Clinton continues to hold decisive leads in two “states that Trump needs to win, given his current electoral map,” notes CBS News. Clinton is up by a comfortable 8 points in Pennsylvania—45 percent to 37 percent—and has a 4-point advantage in North Carolina—46 percent to 42 percent.

Clinton is up by a comfortable 8 points in Pennsylvania—45 percent to 37 percent,

Clinton has a hard core of Democratic support in Philadelphia and Pittsburg. Clinton does NOT have as enthusiastic a support as did Obama. A significant part of the vote went to Sanders. Sanders’ supporters were enthusiastically opposed to Clinton. She will not get all of them. New voters will not be rushing off to vote for Hillary.

Trump has an enthusiastic support base. I have no idea how his ground game is going but I will not be surprised to see Trump take the state.

In Pennsylvania — where Democrats’ registration advantage has fallen by a fifth since the 2012 election, to 915,000 voters — more than 85,000 former Democrats have become Republicans this year, almost three times the number of voters who made the opposite switch.

The U.S. said on Sunday it had not yet struck a hoped-for deal with Russia on stemming the violence in Syria’s brutal civil war, blaming Moscow for backtracking on issues it thought were settled.

...

Mr. Kerry then listed two main priorities to ensure any new ceasefire holds: responding to violations by the Damascus regime and checking the rising influence of the former al-Nusra Front in the country.

It's funny how you and Bob spend so much time and energy trying to paraphrase what others believe. I would suggest you would both be better served by trying to express what you believe. The rest of us would enjoy the silence.

...In recent years it has become popular with Silicon Valley millionaires, and billionaires. Luxurious so-called "plug-n-play" camps have sprung up which use hired staff like cooks, builders and security, and allow international jetsetters to drop in for quick visits.

Many traditional "Burners" claim that is a betrayal of the spirit of "radical self-reliance" that is a cornerstone of the festival, which began in 1986.

As anger boiled over one camp called White Ocean, which hosts high profile DJs on a state-of-the-art stage, became the focus of anger.

The camp first made an appearance at Burning Man three years ago and its founders included the British DJ Paul Oakenfold and the son of a Russian billionaire.

While the camp was holding its "White Party", at which revelers dress all in white and listen to techno music, it was attacked by vandals who flooded it with water and cut power lines.

In a dismayed post on Facebook camp leaders said: "A very unfortunate and saddening event happened last night at White Ocean, something we thought would never be possible in our Burning Man utopia.

"A band of hooligans raided our camp, stole from us, pulled and sliced all of our electrical lines leaving us with no refrigeration and wasting our food, and glued our trailer doors shut.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.